A reader responds to our previous reader roundup, which emphasized poll numbers showing that the vast majority of Americans say they believe in “equality for women” but only a small percentage of Americans identify as “feminist”:

I’m rather surprised you didn’t mention Christina Hoff Sommers’s useful, if controversial, distinction between “equity feminism” and “gender feminism.” (Her 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? goes into great detail, but here’s Wikipedia’s synopsis.) Most everyone is an equity feminist and believes that men and women should have (and do have) equal rights under American law. However, very few are gender feminists—who believe that men and women are physically, psychologically, and mentally equivalent in every way (and if they’re not, then that’s a result of evil patriarchal heterosexist culture, not nature). Very, very few women and almost no men (outside of academia, anyway) are gender feminists.

Another reader also mentions Sommers:

She was recently invited to speak at Oberlin, an event which was vigorously protested. Sommers is very critical of the last 30 years of feminism in general, but her primary critique is that feminism has relied on statistics that are misleading, such as the study that found one in five female college students have been raped.

I remember how shocked I was when I read that statistic, and I had no reason at the time to question its findings. But on further inspection, the study engineered its own results by expanding the definition of rape to include stuff like sex that was later regretted, or even a guy attempting an unsolicited kiss at a drunken party. Some of those interviewed in the study did not think they’d been raped or abused, but that didn’t matter; the imperative was to stir up outrage over the genuinely serious problem of campus rape, and in this it was successful.

Sommers included that rape statistic in a video on “the top five feminist myths of all time.” (Slate’s Emily Yoffe, who is to the left of Sommers, tackled that statistic in greater depth.) However, it’s important to note in the context of this discussion that Sommers still considers herself a feminist. Watch the video embedded above for her lengthy response to the “Are you a feminist?” question.

If your goal is to engage those who think differently, quoting a woman, Caitlin Moran, who accuses her fellow females of being too drunk to respond to a survey in the manner she would prefer is not, perhaps, the best strategy.

In college I identified as a feminist for the simple reason you state:

I know that women have historically had fewer rights than men, and I believe that they are absolutely deserving of equal rights and opportunities (as opposed to outcomes). Now, I don’t identify as a feminist, and in a nutshell, the reason is that the feminist movement espouses a particular set of leftist political beliefs that I don't share. If feminism could accommodate multiple political viewpoints, perhaps I could rejoin the bandwagon.

I don’t know any women who oppose the right to vote, equal access to healthcare (distinct from “my employer must pay for my abortion or contraceptives”), or greater freedom to make whatever sort of life choice she should so desire. I know plenty of women who don’t want to have to pay (with tax dollars) for the lifestyle choices of others (particularly wealthy others with plenty of life opportunities anyway). That would result in a greater tax burden on my family, which would jeopardize my ability to stay home and have the quiet domestic life I desire at this juncture. I take no issue with women making their own choices about careers, sex, or anything else; I just don’t wish to subsidize it, and all too often “feminism,” on this score, seems to call for public funding, or at least expensive regulation.

I also know women who are somewhat weary of being called names because they want to be free to choose conventional lifestyles that prioritize marriage and family, or because they value the lives of unborn children over the license to have no-strings-attached, consequence-free sex. Getting married and staying home to raise children is as valid an option as becoming a CEO. Yet much of the rhetoric I’ve read from self-labeled feminists seems intent on making women the same as men, rather than equal to them.

Worse, some of the proudest “feminists” I know are quite vocal about their disdain for partnership with men. I quite enjoy the complementary features and qualities of the sexes, and whether feminism claims misandry as its own or not, there is a definite correlation between the two in my acquaintance.

So no, I don’t identify as a feminist anymore. If feminism means I have to support a particular political platform that includes permitting the murder of unborn children and paying for universal childcare at the expense of raising my own child, count me out. This isn’t a matter of “misinformation,” as you say, but a matter of experience.

The dictionary definition may be simple, but this is what I have seen from the movement. We may agree on points, and I thank the movement for some of its historical legacy, but its core values and methods differ from my own. As a believer in women’s equality, I will continue to work toward acceptance of women as equals, but I will do so on my own terms, with my own solutions in mind, and not those of the feminist brand.

On the other hand, this female reader declares, “I’m an ardent feminist”:

When I say that out loud, or write it in a comment, I know how it sounds to most people: harsh and persistent. It implies that I might be, in some abstract way in the distant future of a conversation, a difficult woman. I want that harshness to sink it, because my propositions are so reasonable.

What better way to prove that sexism truly exists than to self-identify as someone who is adamant in the fight against its tangible harms (for both men and women) and have that self-identification make most people uncomfortable, if not downright angry? What is up with that cognitive dissonance? I want people to push back against it and examine why they feel it, so I drop this “F word” as much as do the other “F word,” as often as I can without being opportunistic.

Truly great feminism requires an emphasis on the “equality” part. It’s not always that women have to “catch up” in some way to men; it’s that those tangible harms I previously mentioned hurt both sexes, all genders, and feminism aims to make sure that no male, female, or agendered person is hurt because of a set of hate-inspired beliefs.

More of your emails soon. If there’s an aspect of this debate you haven’t seen addressed yet, let me know.

Many readers are emailing about Sophie’s frustration that a growing number of female celebrities are shirking the “feminist” label:

I’m male, and I used to think feminism was outdated, since women already achieved the right to vote and work. As time passed I came to realize feminism is still important, particularly in fighting sexual assault and slut-shaming … but am I a feminist?

There are some people who think, as Sophie implied in her note, that being a feminist just means general support of gender equality in the home, the workplace, the public sphere—so it would be crazy not to identify as one. But some other feminists believe that feminism requires commitment to a pretty specific political agenda, and I can’t honestly say I agree with all those policies. For instance, while it’s ideal for women and men to be paid the same for the same work, I don’t believe the government should police salary negotiations.

So whether or not I’m a feminist depends on your definition. I would like to be, but I’m not ultimately the one who gets to define the word.

Another reader doesn’t want anyone to define it:

The reason why everybody opposes feminism isn’t because of its message; it’s because it’s akin to a religious ideology. You do not decide for me, or anybody, that they are a feminist if they agree with a certain ideal or ideals.

Another is on the same page:

How words are defined is fluid and quite individualistic. It is part of the reason why there is so much miscommunication. Clearly there is something to the definitions these various female celebrities have offered if so many of them share similar views.

Several more readers sound off:

One of the main barriers to more people identifying themselves as feminists is a lack of clarity on what the term actually means. Not all feminists agree that gender equality is the ultimate aim of Feminism. Charlotte Proudman, the British barrister at the centre of the recent LinkedIn sexism controversy [which Sophie covered here], is a self-identified radical feminist who strives for liberation, not equality. She explains her rationale as follows:

The equalist debate is one way of preserving patriarchy, whereas feminism seeks to give power to women on their own terms—not mens. This is why I am a feminist, not an equalist. Equality is harmful to women and most men, as they are required to replicate behaviours that are degrading and dehumanising. Once women buy into the masculine terms of society, our civilization will become crueler than ever expected.

Another issue for many is the persistent infighting. Today, the prevailing feminist ideology is Intersectionality. Those who call themselves feminists but do not demonstrate sufficient familiarity with this concept are branded apostates. High profile examples include Lena Dunham, Caitlin Moran, and Taylor Swift.

These are some of the reasons why I do not identify myself as a feminist, despite supporting gender equality and being pro-choice.

Another reader:

When a large share of your natural allies—younger educated women in particular—reject what they perceive the term has come to mean, and you tell them that they’re wrong because it means only this other thing (that you know they support), you have to realize that the word no longer means only what you’d like it to mean.

It has also come to mean which side you’re on in the war of men vs. women, especially in an online context. (At least “feminism” hasn’t accrued a penumbra anywhere near as toxic as the equally innocuously-named opposition, “Men’s Rights Advocates”!) This idea, that language is not rule-bound but is inseparable from its lived use, is basically the realization Ludwig Wittgenstein came to later in his career. As I’m not a Wittgenstein scholar, I’ll just drop a quote from someone who (readably) is:

...Wittgenstein pioneered the controversial linguistic conception of meaning-as-use, or the idea that the meanings of words, relative or not, cannot be specified in isolation from the life practices in which they are used. Instead, language should be studied from the starting point of its practices, rather from abstractions to syntax and semantics. As Wittgenstein put it, “Speaking a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”

This reader firmly sides with Sophie:

I read her piece and I died a bit inside. I’m emphatically a feminist and I hate to see other women, who have a platform, denounce feminism. They do so because they worry they will be targeted by those who have co-opted the term and turned into code for “I hate men.” Just as “Black Lives Matter” does not mean that those are the ONLY lives who matter, advocating for equality between men and women does not make one a “man hater.”

I have considered myself a feminist since I learned what the word meant, and I know I have benefitted from the generations of feminists who came before me.

Does feminism have problems? Absolutely—the biggest being the exclusion of women of color by mainstream white feminists. But I will always proudly wear the title of feminist as a badge of honor.

To throw some statistics into the mix, the above chart from the Public Religion Research Institute finds that, in 2015, “Less than half of millennial women identify as ‘feminist.’” And from a Vox poll, also this year:

[C]onducted by research and communications firm PerryUndem, [it] shows that a strong majority of Americans agree on gender equality. Eighty-five percent, for example, say they believe in “equality for women.” But many fewer want to put the feminist label on their beliefs. Eighteen percent of poll respondents said they consider themselves feminist.

[J]ust 20 percent of Americans -- including 23 percent of women and 16 percent of men -- consider themselves feminists. Another 8 percent consider themselves anti-feminists, while 63 percent said they are neither. … But asked if they believe that “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals,” 82 percent of the survey respondents said they did, and just 9 percent said they did not.

You have to wonder if that 3 percent bump in 1992 was due to Hillary Clinton coming on the national scene and winning the White House with her husband.

More of your emails to come. If you’d like to counter any of these readers, email hello@theatlantic.com. Also be sure to check out Becca’s note wishing more male politicians and other powerful figures would get asked the “are you a feminist?” question. If you know of any examples of the press doing so, please email the hello@ address.

Sophie writes forcefully of the “long list of female celebrities who’ve declined to identify themselves as feminists out of an assumption that the word implies widespread rejection or dislike of men.” She laments, as do I, that many people embrace the ideas of feminism but nevertheless recoil at the label:

Because whatever the history, whatever the nuances, whatever the charged sentiments associated with political activism, being a feminist is very simple: It means believing that women are and should be equal to men in matters political, social, and economic. They should be able to vote. They should have equal protection under the law and equal access to healthcare and education. They should be paid as much as their male counterparts are for doing exactly the same job. Do you believe in these things? Then, you are a feminist.

These seem like the kinds of things that women are likely to support. They also seem like the kinds of things that men are likely to support.

And I’d like to know when men do. It’s a shame that famous men (not only entertainers, but CEOs and politicians too) are so rarely asked whether they are feminists.

Has anyone asked Mark Zuckerberg whether he is a feminist? What about Barack Obama? What about Bill Gates? I cannot find many examples of men in power being asked how they feel about this label, but if you know of some, please give a shout at hello@theatlantic.com. (Bernie Sanders, to his credit, says he is.)

It’s my hope that just asking this question of men would go a small way to diminishing the stigma that’s attached to this word. (At the same time, I hate the sexism implicit in that belief—that it will become more acceptable to women once men have given it their stamp of approval—but I’m willing to hold my nose to get to my goal.)

But there’s another reason that I think it’s time for reporters and activists to ask men whether they are feminists, and that’s because failing to ask suggests the assumption that they’d answer no. But this is 2015, and these are smart, forward-thinking, and caring men. Let’s give them a chance to claim the feminist mantle, and to use it to champion the women they work with and admire.

The French actress Marion Cotillard recently gave an interview to Porter magazine in which she said, “I don’t qualify myself as a feminist.”

We need to fight for women’s rights, but I don’t want to separate women from men. We’re separated already because we’re not made the same, and it’s the difference that creates this energy in creation and love. Sometimes in the word ‘feminism’ there’s too much separation.

Cotillard joins a long list of female celebrities who’ve declined to identify themselves as feminists out of an assumption that the word implies widespread rejection or dislike of men.

I love men, and I think the idea of ‘raise women to power, take the men away from power’ is never going to work out … We have to have a fine balance. My biggest thing is really sisterhood more than feminism.

No, I wouldn't say feminist—that’s too strong. I think when people hear feminist, it’s like, “Get out of my way, I don't need anyone.” I love that I'm being taken care of and I have a man that’s a leader.

I’m not a feminist—I, I hail men, I love men. I celebrate American male culture, and beer, and bars and muscle cars…

You could call this feminism’s PR problem—that people who’ve never thought much about Betty Friedan or the sex wars or women’s suffrage or marital rape understand feminism to be a Political Movement, with all the internal conflict and jockeying for power and us-versus-them that political movements imply. In rejecting the word, Salma and Carrie and Kelly and Shailene and Marion and Gaga are understanding feminism by what they assume it opposes: men.

But it’s hard to solely blame bad publicity (there can be no advocate more powerful than Beyoncé, who literally stood in front of the word “feminist” spelled out in six-foot high letters) when the real issue seems to be a profound degree of misinformation among women and men as to what feminism actually means.

Because whatever the history, whatever the nuances, whatever the charged sentiments associated with political activism, being a feminist is very simple: It means believing that women are and should be equal to men in matters political, social, and economic. They should be able to vote. They should have equal protection under the law and equal access to healthcare and education. They should be paid as much as their male counterparts are for doing exactly the same job. Do you believe in these things? Then, you are a feminist.

Or, as Caitlin Moran puts it in How to Be a Woman:

We need to reclaim the word ‘feminism.’ We need the word ‘feminism’ back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29 percent of American women would describe themselves as feminist—and only 42 percent of British women—I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? ‘Vogue’ by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY?

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Journalists have become complicit in spreading the president’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Here’s how they can do better.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

One flashpoint came several weeks ago, when President Donald Trump told Axios reporters that he planned to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship because, as he put it, “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” On Twitter, Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote, “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.”

As many journalists quickly pointed out, this was multilayered malarkey. The president was proposing an unconstitutional means of obliterating the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis of a falsehood; more than two dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere have unrestricted jus soli laws, like the U.S. Axios was treating as fact a haphazard plan, in search of an impossible outcome, justified by a false assertion.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Journalists have become complicit in spreading the president’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Here’s how they can do better.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

One flashpoint came several weeks ago, when President Donald Trump told Axios reporters that he planned to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship because, as he put it, “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” On Twitter, Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote, “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.”

As many journalists quickly pointed out, this was multilayered malarkey. The president was proposing an unconstitutional means of obliterating the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis of a falsehood; more than two dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere have unrestricted jus soli laws, like the U.S. Axios was treating as fact a haphazard plan, in search of an impossible outcome, justified by a false assertion.